The book begins, it's true, with a chapter called "Childhood," which caused this reader to grit his teeth, only to discover that it's not about the author's early years at all; it's about his adopting, as an adult, two boys from a poor family in Morocco to give them the advantages Mitterrand had as a child in that emblematically posh neighborhood of Paris, the 16th Arrondissement.

Written with hyperbolic style full of rhetorical tropes, sustained by the anaphoric repetition of "senza che," De Amicis's exaltation of Rome invokes the power of feelings emblematically represented by Rome, a city portrayed as the heart of the country that, juxtaposed to reasoning, constituted for De Amicis the main organ of italianita and offered the only viable means for the creation of consent among a divided and diversified Italian population.

The result is a wide-ranging narrative about how ideas like climatisme became essential to the vitality of the French empire, and the way spas and the colonial experience were intimately linked, nowhere more emblematically than in Vichy.

Beyond its analogies to those other loggia traditions, however, a charity loggia such as that of the Misericordia functioned emblematically as the calling card of the particular institution it fronted, literally that entity's open, welcoming, public face, announcing to the needy that aid was available therein.

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